Join artist Jessica Park on Saturday, February 3 from 2:30 to 4:30 in the Regional Artists Gallery for a reception celebrating her exhibition Enthusiasms: Personal Paintings by Jessica Park. This reception is free and open to the public.

In the Regional Artists Gallery located next to the Moses Gallery, the Museum presents Enthusiasms: Personal Paintings by Jessica Park. This exhibition is on view through May 28 and focuses on a lesser-known aspect of Park’s work, featuring work created during the first decade of her career as well as more recent paintings from the last decade which were created at the artist’s own initiative for herself or as gifts for family and friends. Park is best known for her depictions of architecture, though early in her career she often painted whimsical images of electronic gadgets, signs, logos, and characters from popular culture, all of which still deeply fascinate the artist to this day. These works reflect Park’s personal interests, or “enthusiasms” as she calls them, in popular culture, astronomical phenomenon, and prismatic lights and color, natural or man-made, often configured in tightly controlled grid-like structures.

Jessica Park (b. 1958) sees the world through high definition rainbow-colored glasses. A native of Williamstown, Massachusetts, she is an internationally-acclaimed artist on the autism spectrum. One of the few things that Park connected with during her early childhood was art, and she has been a professional artist since the mid-1980s. Her paintings combine extreme technical proficiency with a transcendent, visionary imagination. Park’s images depict everyday objects with precise attention paid to the most mundane of details, along with scientifically accurate illustrations of rare and unusual astronomical phenomenon, seamlessly brought together into fantastical combinations. This is all done in a brilliant, carefully calculated color palette and intricate patterning that seems to almost vibrate with energy.

Park’s work can be found in the Regional Artists Gallery while paintings by Gayleen Aiken are on view in the John T. Harrison, Jr. Orientation Hall where they are juxtaposed with photographs by Duane Michals in an installation entitled Magic and Mystery.